Sunday, 3 January 2010

Micke Mus

A long time ago the Swedish weekly magazines were family oriented and published lots of comics. Back in the 50's the Mickey Mouse sundays were published in Hemmets Veckotidning under the name "Micky Mus". (Although he was already known as "Musse Pigg" in the comic books. And "Musse Pigg" is still the name we use in Sweden.)

Since these weeklies were distributed over the whole country no other weekly magazine could print the MM sundays. Well, what to do if you were a publisher that wanted to have Mickey anyway?

Either the publisher or the syndicate came up with a "clever" solution: They mounted three old dailies (by Floyd Gottfredson) to a look like a sunday page. And to be on the safe side they changed the name to "Micke Mus". I don't know how long that lasted but here are two samples I found last summer. Both from a christian weekly called "Svenska Journalen". The page numbered 83 is from #44/1945 and the page numbered 7 is oddly enough from #9/1946. They seem to have been published out of order, suggesting that they might have been used elsewhere first.

As a bonus for those of you who are interested in Swedish comics history here are three other comics from the 1946 issue. Rather primitive, but this is what Swedish comics looked like in general at that time.

They did publish "Hiawatha" and "Pinnochio" in the early forties. As well as other american comics, such as "Just Kids" by A.D. Carter and "Home Sweet Home" by Jack Callahan. ( I too got hold of a couple magazines last summer, from 1940 to 1942. )